Most Harmful Websites? Religious Ones

A new report issued by Internet security firm Symantec has found that the sites with the highest rate of malware—harmful software that can be used in the theft of personal information—are religious sites. In fact, religious sites had (on average) four times more malicious malware than pornographic sites ...

Other findings about malware:

The threat to mobile devices, almost exclusively on Android,continues to grow, although it's tiny compared to the PC threat. There are403 million PC threats—and about 4,000 on mobile.

Targeted attacks are no longer limited to large organizations. Some50 percent of such attacks target organizations with fewer than 2,500employees, and almost 18 percent target companies with fewer than 250employees.

Spam is down by 20 percent, largely due to the closure of a Russian spam network. However, malware attacks via social networks are up.

The threat overall has continued to grow hugely, mainly due to thecommoditization of malware. There was an 81 percent increase in maliciousattacks compared with a year earlier. The number of unique malwarevariants increased to 403 million.